


lazy days

by mortalitasi



Series: hil do lok [4]
Category: Elder Scrolls, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Humor, General, content warning for humanoid dragonbanging sorry y'all
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-01
Updated: 2018-01-01
Packaged: 2019-02-26 00:47:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13224690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mortalitasi/pseuds/mortalitasi
Summary: Liette isn't picky—so long as there's some kind of drink and a vaguely-horizontal surface to sleep on, she's content.The World-Eater's perspective on that is, unsurprisingly, wildly alternate to hers.





	lazy days

Watching him try to drink shitty, massively cheap brandy is almost as funny as watching him sniff it.  
  
Alduin all but slams the bottle down (”Don’t break it, you brute!”) and fixes her with a glare that would have made lesser men piss their pants. Luckily, she is neither a man, nor is she anything _big_ enough to be considered in comparisons of size at all.  
  
“You mean to tell me that you drink this… this _swill—_ willingly?”  
  
“Oh, you’re so dramatic,” she says, snatching the dark green bottle back from his grip. His claws clink prettily on the glass. “I’m not exactly shitting gold, you know.”  
  
“You would only have to defecate meager copper bits in order to afford something better,” he replies curtly, narrowing his red eyes at her.  
  
“While I’m touched by your faith in my bowel, I’m only a simple bosmer. With simple tastes.”  
  
He nods his great head—silky hair, horns, and all—at the bottle. “ _That_ is something so far below simple it should not even exist. It is an offense to every creature capable of taking pleasure in flavor. And if you tell me it is an acquired taste—”  
  
“It’s not,” she interjects, thumbing at the glass almost protectively. “It honestly feels like fermented mammoth in the mouth. Horker on the way down.” She pauses. “But the taste is linked to some good things. And people. Drinking this takes me back to them, I suppose.”  
  
He scoffs, fangs glinting in the firelight. “Sentimentality. I shouldn’t have expected any better.”  
  
Liette raises a brow at him, stretching out one short foot to poke him in the shin. “You talk like you don’t know me.” He grunts, a very inelegant and noncommittal reply, and she rests her legs on his thighs. “Are all dragons so knowledgeable and discerning concerning brewery and distillery? Are you actually a race of secret vintners?”  
  
“Don’t be foolish,” he snaps. “I am the World-Eater. I know everything about everything.”  
  
Alright, she’ll take the bait. She moves her foot up just a little higher—enough to make him stiffen in surprise. “About _everything_?” she repeats slowly, and watches with gratification as his grey face reddens.  
  
“ _Dur hi._ ”¹  
  
“Now, now, it’s not very nice to curse your teacher, is it? Hm…”  
  
“Insufferable wretch.”  
  
“Yes, I love you too.”

 

* * *

  

What is a sting of cold to him is a bite of frost to her.

She’s still sleeping deep, the pelts of the bed they’re sharing piled up over her—he can barely see her under the mess of them, just a few coils of her long hair and the suspicion of her proud little nose. When she shifts further to her left—she sleeps on her abdomen, hands curled near her chest, face pressed into the pillows—the furs slip off her back and settle at the curve of her hip.

Her skin is the color of a septim in the firelight, but he’s seen more than gold in it before: bosmer are odd, he’s learned, and she’s odder than even most of them. Perhaps that’s why she was the only one willing or foolish enough to volunteer taking him on. She’s a strange one, this warm body next to him, soft skin peppered with hard scars, too much life crammed into this mortal coil.

He hadn’t known she had a place to call her own. They’re always drifting between cities, traveling the roads, constantly moving on; she’d never said anything about a house, but one day she’d led him to a quiet glen tucked away on the side of a road leading to Riverwood. The little lodge sitting by the rocks of a picturesque waterfall looked like nothing he’d learned to associate with her, but she’d had keys to the front door— _keys_. Not lockpicks.

“Nobody knows I’ve got this place, not even Lydia,” she’d explained as she let him in. “We’ll be all alone.”

Solitude meant no hoods, no gloves, no restrictive disguises or concealing enchantments to mask his eyes, his height, his everything. Just her and him—in this bizarrely cozy and organized house. With a bed. And an armory. And _hot springs_.

“You’ve that look about you,” Liette mumbles into her overly-fluffy pillow, and he starts. Her voice is hoarse with sleep, husky enough to make a shiver trickle down his spine. She’s opened her eyes—maroon, the most dovah part of her—and is watching him. “What are you thinking?”

He draws the pelts over her again, half because he can see the prickle of goosebumps on her shoulders, and half because the expanse of her back is rather distracting. She hums appreciatively at the rasp of his claws at her nape.

“Nothing of import,” he says.

She hums again, closing her eyes and burrowing beneath the blankets. A moment later, the sound of her breathing evening out becomes more evident, and the curiosity growing in him finally bursts forth.

“Tell me things that you’ve done,” he blurts, and for the entire three second interval after that’s escaped him, he feels like a complete halfwit.

At first, it’s almost like she didn’t hear him at all—that she really did fall asleep at the right time, and that he doesn’t have to endure the indignity of having someone remember him demanding such an absurd thing. And then, her lips twitch.

“You mean, besides you?”

“Don’t be _vile_ ,” he hisses, throwing another pelt on top of her. He only gets a wicked laugh as a response.

She peeks out at him and then stretches, languid and catlike, her hair spilling over her arms. It makes just a little bit of heat gather in his throat. “You weren’t complaining last night,” she says, grinning at the embarrassed frown on his face. The smile fades to something more thoughtful and aware, and she brushes the hair from her shoulders. “Were you thinking about anything in specific?”

He still has enough pride to not say _I don’t know_ aloud, so he simply shrugs. The alternative to that answer includes honesty. He doesn’t know, because there is so much he does not know where to start; he wants it all, the past, the present, the future, her loyalty, her questions, her presence. There are no words in Common or Dovahzul adequate to express such a longing.

She brings him back to reality by brushing a hand gently along the ridge at his jaw.

“It’s still early,” she says.

He blinks at her. “It’s almost noon.”

Liette shrugs. “Early enough. If it’s that important, we can talk about it later,” she tells him, and then sits up to link her arms around his neck. He has to cant his eyes upward to look at the ceiling. “Y’ffre’s balls, Alduin. You’re not a temple acolyte.”

He exhales, his breath ruffling the fine hair on the crown of her head. “I am not,” he concedes, dropping his face to press a kiss to her throat. “But I am also no longer unaffected.”

She leans in to tug at the lobe of his ear with her teeth, sharp and small. “That falls under the category of ‘things that aren’t bad.’”

And surprisingly—he’s inclined to believe her.

**Author's Note:**

> ¹ - "Curse you." charming boy.


End file.
